I'm an NFC enthusiast as well! Technically the flipper zero meets your criteria, but I'm guessing there's something else about it that doesn't quite meet up to your needs. When you say programmable, although the Flipper zero is "programmable", it's more like apps and you don't have full control over the device, which could be a limiting factor for whatever you're doing.
It's sort of a self imposed problem as well because the community produces a bunch of pull requests, but only the corporate staff members can approve and merge them into the official firmware. It begs the question why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
I'd be more enthusiastic if they hadn't left the flipper zero community in the lurch and basically abandoned it over the last year (and more obvious in the last 6 months). A new product doesn't mean as much when the business behind it doesn't demonstrate follow through in their first product (even something as simple as giving the community the ability to merge PRs or do releases of bugfixes).
I think we might need another term for working both remote and with a flexible schedule. I'm working remote, have been at a few jobs, but while my location isn't an office, my schedule is fixed, the same as if I were going in.
My read of the proxmark code (https://github.com/RfidResearchGroup/proxmark3/blob/master/c...) is that the `ndefformat` formatted the tag MAD (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/application-note/AN10787.pdf), which you'd do for NDEF, then had a single TLV TERMINATOR at the block where the NDEF message starts. Then he used NFC Tools to write on an NDEF text record (which iOS background reading would ignore) and maybe something else? After that he then used `ndefwrite` to write on a URL record. I wonder if he could have skipped the NFC Tools and written the URL record and gotten the same result. Proxmark dumps before and after using NFC Tools would be insightful.
As a software developer already living in Portland, I'm loving this. I have no quantitative proof, but it feels like, even as recent as 10 years ago, the high tech in the Portland area was very hardware oriented. These days it seems like there are more software startups, and more high profile software companies (Amazon, Google, Ebay) with offices in the area.